Malaria is a parasitic disease that causes significant disease burden, with >2 million cases and 400,000 deaths annually. Vaccination remains a promising avenue for reducing malaria burden, however efforts to create a highly efficacious vaccine have been hampered by a poor understanding of how malarial immunity develops. To improve the understanding of malarial immunity, we aimed to identify targets of protective antibody responses in naturally acquired and experimentally induced malaria. Specifically, we studied epitope level antibody responses to an intrinsically unstructured blood-stage malarial antigen, merozoite surface protein 2 (MSP2) via peptide array ELISA. This was completed for IgM, total IgG, IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, and antibody dependent complement responses, and the results compared between age groups (adults or children) and infection type (naturally acquired or experimentally induced). We found specific epitopes were more immunodominant than others, but that these immunodominant epitopes changed with age, infection type and antibody class. Further, the epitopes that were immunodominant for antibody binding weren’t always the immunodominant epitopes for antibody dependent complement fixation. We also noted that participants mostly demonstrated “discrete recognition”, where the antibody classes each targeted different epitopes. This raises several questions about the relationship between epitopes, B cell class switching, and affinity maturation. Results inform our understanding of how antibodies develop to specific antigen targets in individuals.